10 ms·

by comparing the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, the data could identify when people were facing each other or walking together. More evide

by comparing the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, the data could identify when people were facing each other or walking together. More evidence we need far more privacy controls in mobile operating systems.

gdulli 8y ago
I've always been floored that people leave their location services turned on by default. I have mine on for no more than a few minutes a month. I only turn it on when I'm in an unfamiliar location, don't have my bearings, and looking at the map alone isn't enough to help without GPS.
- crb002 8y ago
  Some people see the glass half full as they have evidence of their movements as an alibi should they need it.
  - smelendez 8y ago
    Or a fake alibi if you're sufficiently determined. Go fishing in a secluded area regularly to establish a pattern. Then go hide your phone there one day, do crime, come back and get phone.
  - TuringNYC 8y ago
    Or half empty -- as evidence they were somewhere unfortunate (doing something totally benign and unrelated.)
    - drusepth 8y ago
      Why would this be a concern? At worst, you're somewhere unfortunate (doing something benign and unrelated) and someone brings you in for questioning about it. Wouldn't they do that in many cases even if your GPS was off (for example, from seeing you on cameras or other means)? It seems better to be able to bring in as many people as possible to get whatever information is needed to help with whatever situation was unfortunate in the first place. If asked, it's not like you're going to lie and say you were somewhere else if your GPS was off. This way, you at least have proof you were exactly where you said you were.
      - eptcyka 8y ago
        It seems you have not at all dealt with ill intentioned law enforcement entities.
        drusepth 8y ago
        While I would wager that I've dealt with police and the court system _significantly_ more than the average American, I will admit I haven't ever encountered ill intentioned law enforcement entities -- it's hard to believe I'm just lucky, though. I think it's pretty safe to say bad LEOs make the news because they're extremely rare, and the backlash against each one found signifies that the oversight exists to ensure they don't last long.
      - TuringNYC 8y ago
        Broadly speaking though, it is because the criminal justice system in the US focuses on conviction as the metric of success, not whether the conviction is of the correct person -- it is simply whether there is sufficient evidence to convince the jury, or sufficient fear to garner an quick plea bargain. Tens of thousands of people confess to crimes is because they are given the option: - 6 months for a plea bargain confession - 10-20yrs if they "fight the charges" but get convicted in court Many cannot afford expensive lawyers, so often times, the odds are stacked against them in court. In more select scenarios, people confess to crimes they had nothing to do with because of pressure applied. One of many examples would be that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge In summary: [Innocent person] + [cowprod electrocution] = [guilty confession] Edit: flow
- interfixus 8y ago
  You are being downvoted for this thoroughly sensible comment. At times, HN voting patterns actually scare me. My location too stays off unless I actively require it, mostly then for navigation. Yes, like just about any kind of countermeasure against anything, this one may sometimes introduce a measure of inconvenience. That's fine with me. No free lunch etc. [Edit: As somewhat expected, this comment on downvotes is itself being heavily downvoted. Q.E.D.]
  - vertexFarm 8y ago
    This is partially the same community that thought these violations would be a good idea in the first place, as long as we get a bit of hamfisted curated content and adtech monetization. Of course some of the invested individuals still want to defend it. Maybe just to maintain the cognitive dissonance and assure ourselves what we're doing to people is okay. Expect to be unpopular, but that's fine--popular is not the same as right. People are willing to take some outrageous risks in exchange for a trivial amount of convenience. Ever see somebody cut across six lanes on the interstate to make an exit that's about twenty feet away at the very last second? Convenience and speed is everything, we don't give a damn about the consequences. And there are eventually going to be serious issues caused by our wild west data mining. Horrible damages have already happened. It's not just paranoia. True, not every software company is abusing their default permissions and telemetry. But the fact that default-on is normalized and expected provides cover for many people who do abuse it. It's complicit. Anyone who cares about infosec knows that security has to be the default, not an obscure setting for power users or something that you have to reset and then it always clicks itself back on when you update or use a particular feature. That's wrong and it's very clear why it's wrong. But it's happening more and more often. Also, security must be the default even if we don't currently see any way for a particular application to be abused, because later there will be attackers more creative than us and they will figure out a way to leverage it. This is like an ironclad law of nature. Pretty much anyone who has made networked software long enough in the past can attest that eventually there's attempts at exploitation that nobody was thinking about at the beginning. I'm sure some of y'all have stories. Every engineer must make it robust at the start, expecting that people will attack and misuse it resulting in damage to real people. Even if we don't see why that would ever happen at the time. We should all responsibly set software defaults to defend the helpless and ignorant, instead of depending on capable people to defend the software.
- kraftman 8y ago
  What are you gaining in exchange for making your life harder?
  - gdulli 8y ago
    I don't know what you mean about making my life harder. I don't see what I have to gain by using location services outside the rare moments I need it. I'm gaining privacy by not keeping it on.
    - Inconel 8y ago
      You're probably gaining significant battery life as well.
    - kuhhk 8y ago
      I think you’re fortunate to not need it, but I lived in an unfamiliar place for a few months and I used my map apps to identify the best routes (public transit, biking, should I walk, or should I Uber?) nearly 3-4 times a day. Turning it off/on would be difficult, but I do set most apps to only allow location services during use... but the maps I have set to always. I also don’t have the Facebook app installed
      - Scoundreller 8y ago
        The alternative is to keep location on (while in use), but download offline maps. No idea if the app phones home with all historical location data if you re-enable data though... Maybe that’s why Google likes to expire it’s offline maps ?
        emj 8y ago
        OsmAnd and MapsWithMe are good apps that you can use offline maps on indefinetly once downloaded. They use Openstreetmap of course.
    - BurningFrog 8y ago
      > I don't know what you mean about making my life harder You're spending time and effort turning this on and off. The rest of us don't.
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  I'm sure you believe that corporations are evil and basically out to get you, but the vast majority of people doesn't. I think it's safe to assume that you're the outlier here. Have you ever tried putting yourself in the shoes of people who leave their GPS on? Can you see how much better the user experience is? Can you understand why someone who never had a negative experience involving their location data might prefer to leave their GPS on? I leave my GPS on all the time. I love going back in time and see where I was at any given time. I can download the data and correlate it with a bunch of other metrics I keep track on. If it wasn't free, I would pay for it. I'm not floored that you turn your GPS off. I've met many people just like you. Some of them had traumatic experiences in the past, others generally don't think other people are trustworthy. I can respect that. Just don't assume it's the default sentiment, because it's not. Here's an interesting survey about trust: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/05/ssc-survey-results-on-trust/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/05/ssc-survey-results-on-...
  - gdulli 8y ago
    > I'm sure you believe that corporations are evil and basically out to get you, but the vast majority of people doesn't. I think it's safe to assume that you're the outlier here. I've worked in ad tech before. I used to write code to do some of this tracking and enable analytics on it. Nobody I worked with was out to antagonize users, but in principle I'd rather not feed a master profile about myself that gets matched, bought, and sold between companies and their partners. There's nothing controversial about my movement throughout the day but I feel better not being tracked.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      You're being tracked anyway just by having your phone turned on.
  - oska 8y ago
    Regarding your first paragraph, let me quote from the HN guidelines [1]: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- drusepth 8y ago
  On the other hand, I've had mine on 24/7 for the past 2-3 years and routinely visit my timeline on Google Maps to look back on exactly where I went on particular days. Looks like this, and I find it extremely awesome/useful: https://i.imgur.com/jxxjg1g.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jxxjg1g.jpg
  - sah2ed 8y ago
    Might be a good idea to obscure the full URL in your screen shot.
    - plttn 8y ago
      I'm 95% sure that URL is safe.
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  I am actually going to buy a separate GPS for the car and disable as much as possible on the phone.
- staplers 8y ago
  Cellular carriers sell your real-time GPS location even if you turn off your phone (GPS chips operate outside the network) Proof: https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...
  - steve_gh 8y ago
    Generally, carriers only have access to the RAN metadata (cell sector, signal strength, etc), not GPS. And in Europe they can't sell or pass on personal data. They can aggregate it, and sell aggregated data (e.g. for transport planning purposes)
    - staplers 8y ago
      Read again. "This includes cell tower and cell sector location, assisted GPS and cell tower trilateration."
  - gsich 8y ago
    GPS chips are receive only.
    - staplers 8y ago
      Read again. "This includes cell tower and cell sector location, assisted GPS and cell tower trilateration."
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    They sell cell-tower data, not GPS data. The article literally says "cell phone location data from nearby cell towers. It's less accurate than using GPS".
    - staplers 8y ago
      Read again. "This includes cell tower and cell sector location, assisted GPS and cell tower trilateration."
- glandium 8y ago
  Fun fact: my Android phone battery was being sucked at a fast pace last month. I don't remember exactly how it presented itself in the UI, but I ended up figuring out that the Google app was the culprit, because it was using the GPS... which I had explicitly disabled. An internet search showed I was not alone with such problems, and that the solution was to manually revoke some permissions for the app (thankfully it was possible). I find it amazing that an app can make use of the GPS when it's disabled! I'm actually seriously pissed about it, but there's not much I can do about it.
  - spac 8y ago
    But you do have the option to purchase phones running operating systems that implement tighter and more credible controls. I believe that companies understand nothing better that consumer dollars.
    - glandium 8y ago
      The fact that I could prevent the app from using the GPS says the OS does have the tight controls already. This is not a problem of permissions model. Also, the only non Android phones are essentially from Apple, and they are too big for my taste. (also, ridiculously expensive ; also, my wife uses iPhones, they all ended their (short) career with a swollen battery; not sure what she does with them)
      - zoul 8y ago
        iPhone SE is small and fairly cheap.
        metildaa 8y ago
        Its also a redheaded stepchild that Apple has discontinued without a replacement, not a great place to migrate to if you want a new phone of similar size in 3 or 4 years running iOS.
        8y ago
- chewz 8y ago
  Not only that. The app for route planning with public transportation in my town. Thanks to GDPR I have learned that they are sharing data with 500 trusted partners! And most of the time you do not need to give the app permission to use the location to do route planning even in unfamiliar neighborhood. You can just input street name or public transport stops have logical unique identifiers. But of course most people do give permission at some point because it is easier to do so and the app i nagging constantly for the permission.
- dithering 8y ago
  I use location and a dash of IFTTT to auto-fill timesheets. I'm aware it's a trade-off.
- squarefoot 8y ago
  The problem is how broad the term location services can be. In this context Facebook is using innocuous camera and sensor data to track the same device around. They could well write some code to listen to the microphone only when nobody around is talking, which per se wouldn't raise any privacy concerns, then use it to track laptops and tablets/phones by matching the sound of their fan under load or the spectral content of finger taps on the screen. Unfortunately I believe there's not much users can do other than stopping using Facebook and any of their and similar products for good, then keep being alert because tracking people is both a business for companies and a tool for governments to suppress dissent, so anyone involved in any technology related to communications will inevitably be incentivized to implement anti-privacy features.
marknadal 8y ago
This is really easy to do. At a hackathon in 2012 our team in just a few hours built tech that would detect who you were standing next to or walking past, all while your phone is in your pocket - we were trying to build a tool that would replace exchanging business cards at conferences.
- granduh 8y ago
  Can you go into more detail with how that worked?
  - netsharc 8y ago
    Not OP, but I'm guessing signal strength measurements, so if 2 devices report similar values they must be close to each other. And then just add the gyroscope info.
    - chrononaut 8y ago
      That's an interesting suggestion. I'm curious if the body position as it relates to the closest antenna and the phone, particularly if the RF energy has to pass through the owner's body, would add too much noise when compared to the person if they're standing facing the closest antenna.
- dangoldin 8y ago
  Have you heard of Bump? They were doing something similar until they were acquired by Google: https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/16/4736860/bump-acquired-by-google https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/16/4736860/bump-acquired-by-...
  - trjordan 8y ago
    They're basically the Google Photos team, now. Have you seen the ads about face recognition and auto-sharing? They've been working on the problem of photo sharing ever since they figured out that people didn't want to share contact info with Bump, they wanted to share photos.
ams6110 8y ago
Or we can not install apps that do this kind of stuff.
- squarefoot 8y ago
  That could mean uninstall the entire operating system because this stuff can be done at device driver level, where closed source is king and even the system administrator can do nothing.
beatgammit 8y ago
I don't want privacy controls, I want complete control. I'm stoked about the Librem 5 project, and I hope it succeeds enough to not disappear in a couple years. I just bought a phone, but I'll likely buy the next rev if the first one works out. I don't need much from my phone, and as long as I can make/receive calls/texts, browse the web, and can get consistent security patches from the community (e.g. some Linux distro supports the platform outside of Purism), I'm happy. Android and iOS already support privacy controls (and root to an extent), but you're usually at the mercy of the manufacturer for updates and have to trust them to not remotely access your phone. And many manufacturers just stop sending updates once their new model is out, which is unacceptable for most people for laptops and desktops, so I don't know why it's tolerated on phones and tablets...
- EGreg 8y ago
  Complete control is easy. End to end encryption. Don’t let them see what you’re doing. MAIDSAFE network!
  - XMPPwocky 8y ago
    What does this actually mean? No, you're not going to end-to-end encrypt your ... gyroscope data. Those words don't make sense in that order, unless you're sending your gyroscope data to somebody else for some reason- in which case your problem is with them.
- electricant 8y ago
  If you are paranoid about your location data and security patches you should consider lineageOS and microg [1]. Awesome projects. You can have your location data stored in your phone and not rely on google. [1] https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    Yes, except this talk [1] still applies [1] https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_android/ https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_...
emilfihlman 8y ago
I don't see it as inherently bad, though.

gdulli 8y ago

I've always been floored that people leave their location services turned on by default. I have mine on for no more than a few minutes a month. I only turn it on when I'm in an unfamiliar location, don't have my bearings, and looking at the map alone isn't enough to help without GPS.

crb002 8y ago
Some people see the glass half full as they have evidence of their movements as an alibi should they need it.
- smelendez 8y ago
  Or a fake alibi if you're sufficiently determined. Go fishing in a secluded area regularly to establish a pattern. Then go hide your phone there one day, do crime, come back and get phone.
- TuringNYC 8y ago
  Or half empty -- as evidence they were somewhere unfortunate (doing something totally benign and unrelated.)
  - drusepth 8y ago
    Why would this be a concern? At worst, you're somewhere unfortunate (doing something benign and unrelated) and someone brings you in for questioning about it. Wouldn't they do that in many cases even if your GPS was off (for example, from seeing you on cameras or other means)? It seems better to be able to bring in as many people as possible to get whatever information is needed to help with whatever situation was unfortunate in the first place. If asked, it's not like you're going to lie and say you were somewhere else if your GPS was off. This way, you at least have proof you were exactly where you said you were.
    - eptcyka 8y ago
      It seems you have not at all dealt with ill intentioned law enforcement entities.
      - drusepth 8y ago
        While I would wager that I've dealt with police and the court system _significantly_ more than the average American, I will admit I haven't ever encountered ill intentioned law enforcement entities -- it's hard to believe I'm just lucky, though. I think it's pretty safe to say bad LEOs make the news because they're extremely rare, and the backlash against each one found signifies that the oversight exists to ensure they don't last long.
    - TuringNYC 8y ago
      Broadly speaking though, it is because the criminal justice system in the US focuses on conviction as the metric of success, not whether the conviction is of the correct person -- it is simply whether there is sufficient evidence to convince the jury, or sufficient fear to garner an quick plea bargain. Tens of thousands of people confess to crimes is because they are given the option: - 6 months for a plea bargain confession - 10-20yrs if they "fight the charges" but get convicted in court Many cannot afford expensive lawyers, so often times, the odds are stacked against them in court. In more select scenarios, people confess to crimes they had nothing to do with because of pressure applied. One of many examples would be that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge In summary: [Innocent person] + [cowprod electrocution] = [guilty confession] Edit: flow
interfixus 8y ago
You are being downvoted for this thoroughly sensible comment. At times, HN voting patterns actually scare me. My location too stays off unless I actively require it, mostly then for navigation. Yes, like just about any kind of countermeasure against anything, this one may sometimes introduce a measure of inconvenience. That's fine with me. No free lunch etc. [Edit: As somewhat expected, this comment on downvotes is itself being heavily downvoted. Q.E.D.]
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  This is partially the same community that thought these violations would be a good idea in the first place, as long as we get a bit of hamfisted curated content and adtech monetization. Of course some of the invested individuals still want to defend it. Maybe just to maintain the cognitive dissonance and assure ourselves what we're doing to people is okay. Expect to be unpopular, but that's fine--popular is not the same as right. People are willing to take some outrageous risks in exchange for a trivial amount of convenience. Ever see somebody cut across six lanes on the interstate to make an exit that's about twenty feet away at the very last second? Convenience and speed is everything, we don't give a damn about the consequences. And there are eventually going to be serious issues caused by our wild west data mining. Horrible damages have already happened. It's not just paranoia. True, not every software company is abusing their default permissions and telemetry. But the fact that default-on is normalized and expected provides cover for many people who do abuse it. It's complicit. Anyone who cares about infosec knows that security has to be the default, not an obscure setting for power users or something that you have to reset and then it always clicks itself back on when you update or use a particular feature. That's wrong and it's very clear why it's wrong. But it's happening more and more often. Also, security must be the default even if we don't currently see any way for a particular application to be abused, because later there will be attackers more creative than us and they will figure out a way to leverage it. This is like an ironclad law of nature. Pretty much anyone who has made networked software long enough in the past can attest that eventually there's attempts at exploitation that nobody was thinking about at the beginning. I'm sure some of y'all have stories. Every engineer must make it robust at the start, expecting that people will attack and misuse it resulting in damage to real people. Even if we don't see why that would ever happen at the time. We should all responsibly set software defaults to defend the helpless and ignorant, instead of depending on capable people to defend the software.
kraftman 8y ago
What are you gaining in exchange for making your life harder?
- gdulli 8y ago
  I don't know what you mean about making my life harder. I don't see what I have to gain by using location services outside the rare moments I need it. I'm gaining privacy by not keeping it on.
  - Inconel 8y ago
    You're probably gaining significant battery life as well.
  - kuhhk 8y ago
    I think you’re fortunate to not need it, but I lived in an unfamiliar place for a few months and I used my map apps to identify the best routes (public transit, biking, should I walk, or should I Uber?) nearly 3-4 times a day. Turning it off/on would be difficult, but I do set most apps to only allow location services during use... but the maps I have set to always. I also don’t have the Facebook app installed
    - Scoundreller 8y ago
      The alternative is to keep location on (while in use), but download offline maps. No idea if the app phones home with all historical location data if you re-enable data though... Maybe that’s why Google likes to expire it’s offline maps ?
      - emj 8y ago
        OsmAnd and MapsWithMe are good apps that you can use offline maps on indefinetly once downloaded. They use Openstreetmap of course.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    > I don't know what you mean about making my life harder You're spending time and effort turning this on and off. The rest of us don't.
miguelrochefort 8y ago
I'm sure you believe that corporations are evil and basically out to get you, but the vast majority of people doesn't. I think it's safe to assume that you're the outlier here. Have you ever tried putting yourself in the shoes of people who leave their GPS on? Can you see how much better the user experience is? Can you understand why someone who never had a negative experience involving their location data might prefer to leave their GPS on? I leave my GPS on all the time. I love going back in time and see where I was at any given time. I can download the data and correlate it with a bunch of other metrics I keep track on. If it wasn't free, I would pay for it. I'm not floored that you turn your GPS off. I've met many people just like you. Some of them had traumatic experiences in the past, others generally don't think other people are trustworthy. I can respect that. Just don't assume it's the default sentiment, because it's not. Here's an interesting survey about trust: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/05/ssc-survey-results-on-trust/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/05/ssc-survey-results-on-...
- gdulli 8y ago
  > I'm sure you believe that corporations are evil and basically out to get you, but the vast majority of people doesn't. I think it's safe to assume that you're the outlier here. I've worked in ad tech before. I used to write code to do some of this tracking and enable analytics on it. Nobody I worked with was out to antagonize users, but in principle I'd rather not feed a master profile about myself that gets matched, bought, and sold between companies and their partners. There's nothing controversial about my movement throughout the day but I feel better not being tracked.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    You're being tracked anyway just by having your phone turned on.
- oska 8y ago
  Regarding your first paragraph, let me quote from the HN guidelines [1]: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
drusepth 8y ago
On the other hand, I've had mine on 24/7 for the past 2-3 years and routinely visit my timeline on Google Maps to look back on exactly where I went on particular days. Looks like this, and I find it extremely awesome/useful: https://i.imgur.com/jxxjg1g.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jxxjg1g.jpg
- sah2ed 8y ago
  Might be a good idea to obscure the full URL in your screen shot.
  - plttn 8y ago
    I'm 95% sure that URL is safe.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
I am actually going to buy a separate GPS for the car and disable as much as possible on the phone.
staplers 8y ago
Cellular carriers sell your real-time GPS location even if you turn off your phone (GPS chips operate outside the network) Proof: https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...
- steve_gh 8y ago
  Generally, carriers only have access to the RAN metadata (cell sector, signal strength, etc), not GPS. And in Europe they can't sell or pass on personal data. They can aggregate it, and sell aggregated data (e.g. for transport planning purposes)
  - staplers 8y ago
    Read again. "This includes cell tower and cell sector location, assisted GPS and cell tower trilateration."
- gsich 8y ago
  GPS chips are receive only.
  - staplers 8y ago
    Read again. "This includes cell tower and cell sector location, assisted GPS and cell tower trilateration."
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  They sell cell-tower data, not GPS data. The article literally says "cell phone location data from nearby cell towers. It's less accurate than using GPS".
  - staplers 8y ago
    Read again. "This includes cell tower and cell sector location, assisted GPS and cell tower trilateration."
glandium 8y ago
Fun fact: my Android phone battery was being sucked at a fast pace last month. I don't remember exactly how it presented itself in the UI, but I ended up figuring out that the Google app was the culprit, because it was using the GPS... which I had explicitly disabled. An internet search showed I was not alone with such problems, and that the solution was to manually revoke some permissions for the app (thankfully it was possible). I find it amazing that an app can make use of the GPS when it's disabled! I'm actually seriously pissed about it, but there's not much I can do about it.
- spac 8y ago
  But you do have the option to purchase phones running operating systems that implement tighter and more credible controls. I believe that companies understand nothing better that consumer dollars.
  - glandium 8y ago
    The fact that I could prevent the app from using the GPS says the OS does have the tight controls already. This is not a problem of permissions model. Also, the only non Android phones are essentially from Apple, and they are too big for my taste. (also, ridiculously expensive ; also, my wife uses iPhones, they all ended their (short) career with a swollen battery; not sure what she does with them)
    - zoul 8y ago
      iPhone SE is small and fairly cheap.
      - metildaa 8y ago
        Its also a redheaded stepchild that Apple has discontinued without a replacement, not a great place to migrate to if you want a new phone of similar size in 3 or 4 years running iOS.
        8y ago
chewz 8y ago
Not only that. The app for route planning with public transportation in my town. Thanks to GDPR I have learned that they are sharing data with 500 trusted partners! And most of the time you do not need to give the app permission to use the location to do route planning even in unfamiliar neighborhood. You can just input street name or public transport stops have logical unique identifiers. But of course most people do give permission at some point because it is easier to do so and the app i nagging constantly for the permission.
dithering 8y ago
I use location and a dash of IFTTT to auto-fill timesheets. I'm aware it's a trade-off.
squarefoot 8y ago
The problem is how broad the term location services can be. In this context Facebook is using innocuous camera and sensor data to track the same device around. They could well write some code to listen to the microphone only when nobody around is talking, which per se wouldn't raise any privacy concerns, then use it to track laptops and tablets/phones by matching the sound of their fan under load or the spectral content of finger taps on the screen. Unfortunately I believe there's not much users can do other than stopping using Facebook and any of their and similar products for good, then keep being alert because tracking people is both a business for companies and a tool for governments to suppress dissent, so anyone involved in any technology related to communications will inevitably be incentivized to implement anti-privacy features.

marknadal 8y ago

This is really easy to do. At a hackathon in 2012 our team in just a few hours built tech that would detect who you were standing next to or walking past, all while your phone is in your pocket - we were trying to build a tool that would replace exchanging business cards at conferences.

granduh 8y ago
Can you go into more detail with how that worked?
- netsharc 8y ago
  Not OP, but I'm guessing signal strength measurements, so if 2 devices report similar values they must be close to each other. And then just add the gyroscope info.
  - chrononaut 8y ago
    That's an interesting suggestion. I'm curious if the body position as it relates to the closest antenna and the phone, particularly if the RF energy has to pass through the owner's body, would add too much noise when compared to the person if they're standing facing the closest antenna.
dangoldin 8y ago
Have you heard of Bump? They were doing something similar until they were acquired by Google: https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/16/4736860/bump-acquired-by-google https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/16/4736860/bump-acquired-by-...
- trjordan 8y ago
  They're basically the Google Photos team, now. Have you seen the ads about face recognition and auto-sharing? They've been working on the problem of photo sharing ever since they figured out that people didn't want to share contact info with Bump, they wanted to share photos.

ams6110 8y ago

Or we can not install apps that do this kind of stuff.

squarefoot 8y ago
That could mean uninstall the entire operating system because this stuff can be done at device driver level, where closed source is king and even the system administrator can do nothing.

beatgammit 8y ago

I don't want privacy controls, I want complete control. I'm stoked about the Librem 5 project, and I hope it succeeds enough to not disappear in a couple years. I just bought a phone, but I'll likely buy the next rev if the first one works out. I don't need much from my phone, and as long as I can make/receive calls/texts, browse the web, and can get consistent security patches from the community (e.g. some Linux distro supports the platform outside of Purism), I'm happy. Android and iOS already support privacy controls (and root to an extent), but you're usually at the mercy of the manufacturer for updates and have to trust them to not remotely access your phone. And many manufacturers just stop sending updates once their new model is out, which is unacceptable for most people for laptops and desktops, so I don't know why it's tolerated on phones and tablets...

EGreg 8y ago
Complete control is easy. End to end encryption. Don’t let them see what you’re doing. MAIDSAFE network!
- XMPPwocky 8y ago
  What does this actually mean? No, you're not going to end-to-end encrypt your ... gyroscope data. Those words don't make sense in that order, unless you're sending your gyroscope data to somebody else for some reason- in which case your problem is with them.
electricant 8y ago
If you are paranoid about your location data and security patches you should consider lineageOS and microg [1]. Awesome projects. You can have your location data stored in your phone and not rely on google. [1] https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Yes, except this talk [1] still applies [1] https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_android/ https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_...

emilfihlman 8y ago

I don't see it as inherently bad, though.